Tag Archives: healers

Always have a full supply of soul shards. Back in the day, warlocks actually had a soul shard bag, with up to 32 soul shards in there. I recall running TOGC once and one of the other warlocks had NO soul shards. Not acceptable. If you fail at this simple task, you should roll a mage.

Know what pet suits what encounter. Don’t be uneducated in this matter. Warlocks have pets for maximum burst dps, for PvP, for raids, for soloing and tank pets. Our advantage is our demonoids are not sourced like hunter pets, so we know (or should know) who is who in our zoo. Don’t mess it up! Learn your pets abilities, and learn how they affect your play style and encounter!

Don’t soul stone yourself (unless soloing). This is the stupidest and most selfish thing I have seen locks do. They see an encounter heading down the alley of pear shapedness, and instead of SS’ing the healer (preferably) or the tank (if paladin or druid and healer is down), they soul stone themselves. Fair enough, with the advent of guild levels, many guilds now have a level 25 mass rez ability, but you would be surprised how stupid some people can be, and some just simply choose not to use it. If you are one of these locks, then you do not deserve to be a lock. Soul-stoning has become ever more critical now that it also serves as a battle rez, and if you don’t want your whole party/raid griefing you for being a total noob, DO NOT SS YOURSELF!

Don’t pull aggro intentionally and don’t expect the tank to not be upset if you do. Waiting a second or two for the tank to have a grasp on their threat generation is important in some instances in where and how the encounter goes down. If you are one of those people who think they can behave like you do when soloing, think again. This is not just a warlock thing. Often gung-ho rogues and hunters think they are somehow better at threat generation and mitigation than the tank. If you are one of these people, expect to be alone for a lot of your wow life, because tanks and healers and even other DPS will not tolerate this behaviour. If you want to play like a tank, smell like a tank, and look like a tank (but play a rogue, hunter, warlock, mage or any other class etc) then roll a class that can be a tank. Simple. Consequently, if you are a dps who thinks that not waiting a second or two for the tank to grab threat is not important, then expect to die, and in some cases, don’t expect a rez. You are not a child. And considering the massiveness of MMORPG’s, people will not tolerate this.

Know your spells, know your abilities, and understand your limitations. Don’t let someone tell you how you should be playing your toon. (be the expert instead!)

If you don’t already, start getting in to a little PvP. I myself have to be in the mood for it, and often when I am it may be a couple of weeks where all I do is PvP. It is one of the best ways to learn your toon. Due to the swiftness of most PvP combat, and the fact that you are playing against another person as opposed to an npc, you learn very quickly ways to get out of traps and snares, how to slow down incoming opponents, best pets to use per abilities, and most importantly, how to defend yourself. Don’t expect to be a pro from day one – PvP is challenging at the best of times, and sometimes can lead to mild nerd rage! But do not give up! Eventually you will see exactly how things work in that warlock head, and PvP and PvE will become much more exciting and interesting for you.

Learn your encounters before popping cooldowns. Don’t waste them just to boost your dps a little bit. Ensure you deploy CD’s at times when they really do matter.

Ride around capital cities on your dread-steed. You are a warlock after all.

Always place a DOT on a target before your pet starts to attack it. If your pet attacks it first, you lose the loot of that target.

And finally, make friends with a nerdy mage to port you around places and be the pun of all your finely tuned mockery 🙂

So I haven’t really had much of an opportunity to blog this week, or play wow either. In fact, I was so pissed off with my stupid Alien that I didn’t even log until I hooked up my desktop again.

But, I must admit today was a lot of fun. A couple of guildies and Pixiie Lock went meandering through old school WoTLK raids and even some late level BC raids for a little bit of farming fun. We didn’t get anything too flash, but a few new achievement points on our belt were added, and overall we had a heap of fun doing it.

I actually enjoy these moments in an expansion, when you have your gear, and have finished all in terms raiding, points, and gearing, and can spend some time doing other weird and wonderful stuff in WoW. It is also interesting to look at how you can progress as a toon in solo terms, and is a good way to test your abilities on your toon. It’s an interesting concept to work with, because initially it started with myself, my husbands mage and another guildie and his shaman. It was not only fun, but interesting to see how 3 players could dominate in an arena where once you needed 25 cooperative team players, usually a specific mix of three groups, tanks, healers and dps. In late BC content, there was also a very specific need and role for particular classes and races. It was not unusual to see PUG’s or even guild groups requiring the use of specific talents a player had, such as a warlock summoning stone, a mage blink, a paladin bubble etc. I think with the introduction of Cataclysm, a lot of that specificity was removed so that mostly, but not all players had some kind of interrupt or stun bility, and most but not all, had a way in which they could heal themselves etc and so forth. This changed the dynamic of group creation, where once a shaman was the only one who could pop hero and let the group unleash, now a Mage and a DK (with the right requirements) can also pop their class equivalent.

In terms of whether or not this type of content retains any relevance after the fact, I do believe it does. For example, when I finally rolled a paladin and wanted to learn how to tank, I ensured I not only leveled as Prot, but also went into older content to understand how new abilities responded, when they were best used, how to approach mobs, caster mobs, melee mobs etc, when I could use different abilities, how much I could heal myself for with and without procs. All of this is valuable in understanding how you can be a better player on that toon. In terms of my warlock, it lets me look at ways I can be more productive with different pets and abilities, and allows me to test different rotations and strategies. In terms of learning something new about my lock today, well, I didn’t. However I did enjoy a romp in the old land, and did something not so monotonous in the lead up to MoP.